one night.

We are always walking when we don’t know what to do. I am always walking when I have nowhere to go. To sit still somewhere is too painful in loneliness or boredom, and so the walking. And so we were walking.

I like to take things in. I look and look and look and think. He likes to poke his head inside places. I would never go in alone. I would just look and think.

Last night, we decided we both needed to go to the Gap. New shirt, new pants. We rode the train up to that part of town where nothing is open on the weekend, and when we got off we realized - nothing is open here on the weekend. The Gap was closed. And that is when we started walking. We walked by a Thai restaurant. He asked, Remember the time we ate there? And I answered, We’ve never eaten there. One of us was confused, but no one gave in and no one was wrong. We walked by an art gallery with a small sign and a big wood and glass door. He tried the doorknob and it was locked. He held a finger over a doorbell and looked to me. A woman appeared and swung the door open. She told us the gallery had just closed, but she was there and we might as well look. So we did.

The gallery was showing the work of Lukman Ahmad. Some of it was gray and yellow and dramatic. Some of it was bright blocks of color and horses. I liked the colors, Jake liked the drama. The woman asked us what art we were drawn to and I didn’t answer. I smiled because I don’t know how to talk about art. Jake told her that he worked in theater and I was a writer. She asked if we were new in town. He told her I had just moved from Boston. She told me she had moved from Boston thirty years ago and she was still here. We laughed and we left.

I said, If you’re going to keep telling people I’m a writer, I better start writing something. I said, What if thirty years from now, we’re telling people how we moved here from Boston thirty years ago? I said, We’d be near sixty years old. I said, I can’t think about it, the future, the future.

Thirty years felt very long, but somehow, I could see myself in it. I could see my life flashing, my whole life there and myself in it, young and old, young and old. Mary Ruefle said, “I remember the first time I realized the world we are born into is not the one we leave.”

I felt young and old and not much like a writer. We kept walking.